Good for you if your '83 SIII dash switches work reliably. My '86 110 switches are always breaking or failing for some reason. Perhaps it's the 1984 metal -> plastic conversion. I actually put a Windows XP touch screen on the centre console at one point, with the computer in the cubby box, but ripped all that out when the iPad came out and was superior to my setup in almost every conceivable manner.
I use statistics a lot. There's a lot of number crunching in programming, and data sets are getting bigger and bigger. Understanding statistics helps you understand trends, when they are significant and when they aren't, etc. I actually wish I understood stats better and should do some more reading on it.
I must be a bit of a nerd, because I find calculus useful just in everyday life, let alone for my job. Understanding the difference between a change and a rate of change is something that most of us can intuitively grasp if we think hard enough about it, but being able to apply the language of calculus to that event helps me better understand and communicate it. Again, when applied to working with datasets, calculus becomes very important.
Mathematics is a language that is used to describe reality. The better you understand mathematics, the better you can understand the world around you, and the better you can articulate that understanding, both to yourself and to others.
I'd still be happy to be worth about $8M. Sure, it could have been more, and at one time was on paper, but if this is true he still has done really well for himself.
You can get a set of Sennheiser HD280 Pros on Amazon for about $100. Granted, that's twice what the submitter wants to pay, but in every other way they're exactly what he's looking for. He wants noise-isolating headphones with a flat, linear response, long-term comfort and durability. That pretty much defines the Sennheiser HD280 Pros.
I've had a set of HD280s for 8 years now. Granted, they're falling apart, but they still sound as good as they did when they were new, and they've been with me over several trans- and cross-continental trips. I'm not really aware of what's on the market now, but the HD280s have proven themselves over the years to be a very smart buy. I'm not sure a cheaper pair would have held up as well, which in the long term brings down the Sennheisers' effective cost.
Cool, thanks for the info. People often comment that I'm standing (and maybe stretching) when social convention dictates that I sit, so maybe if I'm standing all day at work I'll be ready to sit when people expect me to:-)
Make sure you factor in the motorized height adjustment too. Once you've designed and built that, factor in your time and report back to us how many hundred dollars you saved. Maybe you'll end up with something better for less, but for others it's money well spent.
I'm interested in doing this, but I'm concerned about a few things. If you can provide more insight into your experience, I'd appreciate it, thanks!
What general sort of work do you do? By that I mean, what kind of typing are you doing? Writing technical documentation? Coding? Writing emails?
Do you find that your typing has slowed down at all? If so, could you give me an idea of how much?
Do you find it harder to read while you're moving? I have a dual monitor setup, with my main monitor being a 30" 2560x1600 monitor. I've already bumped up the font sizes in a lot of applications due to my eyesight not being quite as good as it used to be.
Regardless of whether I get a treadmill, I think I'll get a height-adjustable desk, and at least stand up for part of the day, in addition to the chair and ball I'm using now. Then maybe I'll borrow a treadmill for a few weeks and try it out before I potentialy buy a better one for under the desk.
This is sort of what I think might work for me. I have two large monitors, and that desk has a nice monitor arm that can swing the monitors to where they work for you, whether you're sitting, standing, or walking. With a desk like that, I could walk on a treadmill, stand still, sit in a chair or on a ball.
The main problem with the idea is that the setup is very expensive. I'm self-employed, so while the upside is that I can buy whatever I want, the downside is that I have to pay for it. I haven't been convinced yet that I'll be able to do effectively write code while walking on a treadmill. It's one of those things I'd want to try for a week or two to see if it would work for me before laying out the cash.
In the meantime, I just try to remember to sit on my exercise ball for at least part of the day. I read the about the study everyone else on here is mentioning about how being sedentary during the workday is bad, even if you exercise daily. However, I haven't really read whether sititng on an exercise ball helps counteract that or not.
I'm sitting on a ball right now. it is great, and I find it much better than sitting on a chair all day. I have both and switch between them as I feel like it. I can definitely feel in my back (in a good way) after an hour or so that I've been sitting on the ball, so I know it's doing something. I'm sure if I used it more, the muscles would get more used to it.
Anyway, I highly recommend it if you're able. If your workplace won't allow it, then they really suck, as it doesn't bother anyone else, it's not expensive, and it's good for you.
They clearly used an unlucky cat, as this one was apparently roadkill. I'd be more concerned about it accidentally flying into a busy road and getting hit by a bus.
Like most languages, there are a bunch of different ways of writing the same code. You can choose the one that works best for you.
Dealing with PHP has been like pulling my own teeth in comparison to CFML. In PHP I have to wrap loops and variable outputs in or which just looks like crap and is hard for me to read and keep up with opening and closing loops, braces, etc. CFML seems clean and elegant in comparison.
CFScript lets you write code that makes it look like it is a real programming language. Tags have their place, but I agree that when you HAVE to use them, they eventually get old.
Railo is great. After spending the last few months working on a web-based application with a PHP front end and a Java backend, I really miss working with Railo (or ColdFusion).
Ideally, I'd write the front-end code in CFML, and the business logic with a combination of CFML (with the excellent and unubtrusive FW/1 framework) and Java for the heavy lifting where appropriate. For extra points, package it all up and deploy it on Railo/Tomcat/Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
I haven't seen an analogue to this idea outside the ColdFusion world, but CFFormProtect is an awesome tool for protecting ColdFusion-based sites from spam.
The basic idea behind CFFormProtect is that spam protection shouldn't involve annoying hurdles that users have to jump over, and should be as invisible as possible to the user. It takes what I would say is a similar approach to SpamAssassin, in that it uses multiple heuristic methods to rank form postings for potential spamminess. I've used it extensively and I've been really impressed with it. I'm not saying that it can't be defeated by a machine, but at least it doesn't annoy and flummox the site's users in the process.
Well, off the top of my head, I really like SQL Server Management Studio. It's the best database front end I've used, by a wide margin.
I also like SQL Server's profiling and optimization tools. The query plan is nice, the tracing tools are great, etc. The depth of options I have to performance tune SQL Server over anything I've seen in MySQL is significant. It might all be there in MySQL too, but it's easier to find and use in SQL Server.
I spend much more of my time these days with MySQL than SQL Server. I can work with MySQL, but I really ENJOY working in SQL Server. It's the only Microsoft tool I actually actively like. I haven't used PostgreSQL enough to really form an opinion about it.
ABSOLUTELY. If GM made better cars, more people would buy them. My truism is that GM makes cars for people who hate cars and hate driving.
Some of their cars might be getting better, but if so, I haven't seen sufficient evidence of that that based on my occasional rental car. GM needs to make better cars, and then somehow convince the rest of us who have given up on them that they make better cars. Not just better cars than they used to (I'm sure this is true), but better cars than Toyota, Kia, and BMW.
GM's general problem seems to be that they rely on people buying their cars either because they're "domestic", or because they genuinely just don't know that there's better out there. They make cars based on what they think people wanted 5 years ago, not what people are going to need in 5 years. There are exceptions, but that's the rule.
I'm not generally a Microsoft fan, but I love SQL Server. However, I haven't started a new project with it in years, I guess since pricing for SQL Server 2008 was announced. I've not been in a situation where I could justify the costs as the project (hopefully) was successful and scaled up. I also don't like being forced to run my database server on Windows. For these reasons, I just don't use it any more except in projects where it was selected years ago. I know you have to look at TCO, but I still can't generally justify the costs for SQL Server and Windows Server.
If I was working in a corporate environment with big budgets to throw at projects, then I'd probably still be using it SQL Server at times. In my world though, it generally just doesn't add up.
Google long maintained that the engineer was solely responsible for this aspect of the project, which resulted in official investigations, some still unresolved, in more than a dozen countries. But a complete version of the F.C.C.’s report, released by Google on Saturday, has cast doubt on that explanation, saying that the engineer informed at least one superior and that seven engineers who worked on the code were all in a position to know what was going on.
The F.C.C. report also had Engineer Doe spelling out his intentions quite clearly in his initial proposal. Managers of the Street View project said they never read it.
Depicting his actions as the work of a rogue “requires putting a lot of dots together,” Mr. Milner said enigmatically Sunday before insisting again he had no comment. He said he was closely following the news reports on the issue.
If that's all to be believed, Milner reported on what he was doing, and sent it to his boss(es). They opted to "not read" the report. If at least six other engineers were in a position to know, then this sounds more like a "no, don't put this in writing or tell us what you're doing" situation than a rogue employee. If bosses aren't responsible for their employees, what are they there for?
A grey market, according to Wikipedia, "is the trade of a commodity through distribution channels which, while legal, are unofficial, unauthorized, or unintended by the original manufacturer."
That coincides with the definition I'd understood of a grey market. I checked Wikipedia before responding to make sure I wasn't wrong. For example, I have a grey market vehicle. It was never sold in this country, but was legally imported outside the regular channels. If I'd forged the VINs or done something illegal in order to bring in a vehicle that is not legally allowed here, that would have been a black market import.
You can only use Google Flight Search for flights originating in the United States. Therefore, it's a non-starter for me in Canada when compared to, say, Kayak.
Maybe I'm not understanding your issue, but Kayak does something like this. You can do a search from multiple airports, to multiple airports. You can include surrounding airports. You can have it email you daily search results for the cheapest flight per month for the next few months. That way, say you want to fly to Amsterdam or Paris or Geneva, and you don't care when you fly between today and October, and you're willing to stay for anywhere from 7-14 nights, you can get daily notifications of fare changes for all that and book when you see a price you like.
I'd like Dropbox a lot more if they offered personal plans above 100GB. I have more like 400GB I'd like to sync between multiple computers, and store off-site. Therefore, Dropbox doesn't work for me. Google Drive will scale to 16TB.
Thanks for the clarification. I don't remember all the details now. I know I could get it to boot with no video, because I'd be able to get into it via SSH and Back-to-my-Mac. However, I don't remember if that was with the internal drive or an external one. I remember them saying they couldn't get the chime to work, so they said it "didn't boot" according to their criteria. They also used an external diagnostics drive for part of this.
Anyway, the result was that although it was a faulty GPU that caused the problem, they classed it as a motherboard failure and not a GPU failure, and they wouldn't cover the repair. I've since cannibalized some of the RAM for my wife's Powerbook, and the hdd for something else, and it's sitting here all opened up, like an abandoned whale carcass (although of course much smaller and not as smelly).
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Good for you if your '83 SIII dash switches work reliably. My '86 110 switches are always breaking or failing for some reason. Perhaps it's the 1984 metal -> plastic conversion. I actually put a Windows XP touch screen on the centre console at one point, with the computer in the cubby box, but ripped all that out when the iPad came out and was superior to my setup in almost every conceivable manner.
I use statistics a lot. There's a lot of number crunching in programming, and data sets are getting bigger and bigger. Understanding statistics helps you understand trends, when they are significant and when they aren't, etc. I actually wish I understood stats better and should do some more reading on it.
I must be a bit of a nerd, because I find calculus useful just in everyday life, let alone for my job. Understanding the difference between a change and a rate of change is something that most of us can intuitively grasp if we think hard enough about it, but being able to apply the language of calculus to that event helps me better understand and communicate it. Again, when applied to working with datasets, calculus becomes very important.
Mathematics is a language that is used to describe reality. The better you understand mathematics, the better you can understand the world around you, and the better you can articulate that understanding, both to yourself and to others.
I'd still be happy to be worth about $8M. Sure, it could have been more, and at one time was on paper, but if this is true he still has done really well for himself.
Oops, replying to undo my accidental "offtopic" mod ... sorry!
You can get a set of Sennheiser HD280 Pros on Amazon for about $100. Granted, that's twice what the submitter wants to pay, but in every other way they're exactly what he's looking for. He wants noise-isolating headphones with a flat, linear response, long-term comfort and durability. That pretty much defines the Sennheiser HD280 Pros.
I've had a set of HD280s for 8 years now. Granted, they're falling apart, but they still sound as good as they did when they were new, and they've been with me over several trans- and cross-continental trips. I'm not really aware of what's on the market now, but the HD280s have proven themselves over the years to be a very smart buy. I'm not sure a cheaper pair would have held up as well, which in the long term brings down the Sennheisers' effective cost.
Cool, thanks for the info. People often comment that I'm standing (and maybe stretching) when social convention dictates that I sit, so maybe if I'm standing all day at work I'll be ready to sit when people expect me to :-)
Make sure you factor in the motorized height adjustment too. Once you've designed and built that, factor in your time and report back to us how many hundred dollars you saved. Maybe you'll end up with something better for less, but for others it's money well spent.
I'm interested in doing this, but I'm concerned about a few things. If you can provide more insight into your experience, I'd appreciate it, thanks!
What general sort of work do you do? By that I mean, what kind of typing are you doing? Writing technical documentation? Coding? Writing emails?
Do you find that your typing has slowed down at all? If so, could you give me an idea of how much?
Do you find it harder to read while you're moving? I have a dual monitor setup, with my main monitor being a 30" 2560x1600 monitor. I've already bumped up the font sizes in a lot of applications due to my eyesight not being quite as good as it used to be.
Regardless of whether I get a treadmill, I think I'll get a height-adjustable desk, and at least stand up for part of the day, in addition to the chair and ball I'm using now. Then maybe I'll borrow a treadmill for a few weeks and try it out before I potentialy buy a better one for under the desk.
This is sort of what I think might work for me. I have two large monitors, and that desk has a nice monitor arm that can swing the monitors to where they work for you, whether you're sitting, standing, or walking. With a desk like that, I could walk on a treadmill, stand still, sit in a chair or on a ball.
The main problem with the idea is that the setup is very expensive. I'm self-employed, so while the upside is that I can buy whatever I want, the downside is that I have to pay for it. I haven't been convinced yet that I'll be able to do effectively write code while walking on a treadmill. It's one of those things I'd want to try for a week or two to see if it would work for me before laying out the cash.
In the meantime, I just try to remember to sit on my exercise ball for at least part of the day. I read the about the study everyone else on here is mentioning about how being sedentary during the workday is bad, even if you exercise daily. However, I haven't really read whether sititng on an exercise ball helps counteract that or not.
I'm sitting on a ball right now. it is great, and I find it much better than sitting on a chair all day. I have both and switch between them as I feel like it. I can definitely feel in my back (in a good way) after an hour or so that I've been sitting on the ball, so I know it's doing something. I'm sure if I used it more, the muscles would get more used to it.
Anyway, I highly recommend it if you're able. If your workplace won't allow it, then they really suck, as it doesn't bother anyone else, it's not expensive, and it's good for you.
They clearly used an unlucky cat, as this one was apparently roadkill. I'd be more concerned about it accidentally flying into a busy road and getting hit by a bus.
Like most languages, there are a bunch of different ways of writing the same code. You can choose the one that works best for you.
Dealing with PHP has been like pulling my own teeth in comparison to CFML. In PHP I have to wrap loops and variable outputs in or which just looks like crap and is hard for me to read and keep up with opening and closing loops, braces, etc. CFML seems clean and elegant in comparison.
CFScript lets you write code that makes it look like it is a real programming language. Tags have their place, but I agree that when you HAVE to use them, they eventually get old.
Railo is great. After spending the last few months working on a web-based application with a PHP front end and a Java backend, I really miss working with Railo (or ColdFusion).
Ideally, I'd write the front-end code in CFML, and the business logic with a combination of CFML (with the excellent and unubtrusive FW/1 framework) and Java for the heavy lifting where appropriate. For extra points, package it all up and deploy it on Railo/Tomcat/Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
I haven't seen an analogue to this idea outside the ColdFusion world, but CFFormProtect is an awesome tool for protecting ColdFusion-based sites from spam.
The basic idea behind CFFormProtect is that spam protection shouldn't involve annoying hurdles that users have to jump over, and should be as invisible as possible to the user. It takes what I would say is a similar approach to SpamAssassin, in that it uses multiple heuristic methods to rank form postings for potential spamminess. I've used it extensively and I've been really impressed with it. I'm not saying that it can't be defeated by a machine, but at least it doesn't annoy and flummox the site's users in the process.
Yeah, but that wouldn't make for a very good movie:
Excuse me, could we please have our jobs back? No? Umm, OK then, thanks for your time.
Our stereotypical approach would involve neither kicking ass, nor taking names.
Well, off the top of my head, I really like SQL Server Management Studio. It's the best database front end I've used, by a wide margin.
I also like SQL Server's profiling and optimization tools. The query plan is nice, the tracing tools are great, etc. The depth of options I have to performance tune SQL Server over anything I've seen in MySQL is significant. It might all be there in MySQL too, but it's easier to find and use in SQL Server.
I spend much more of my time these days with MySQL than SQL Server. I can work with MySQL, but I really ENJOY working in SQL Server. It's the only Microsoft tool I actually actively like. I haven't used PostgreSQL enough to really form an opinion about it.
ABSOLUTELY. If GM made better cars, more people would buy them. My truism is that GM makes cars for people who hate cars and hate driving.
Some of their cars might be getting better, but if so, I haven't seen sufficient evidence of that that based on my occasional rental car. GM needs to make better cars, and then somehow convince the rest of us who have given up on them that they make better cars. Not just better cars than they used to (I'm sure this is true), but better cars than Toyota, Kia, and BMW.
GM's general problem seems to be that they rely on people buying their cars either because they're "domestic", or because they genuinely just don't know that there's better out there. They make cars based on what they think people wanted 5 years ago, not what people are going to need in 5 years. There are exceptions, but that's the rule.
I'm not generally a Microsoft fan, but I love SQL Server. However, I haven't started a new project with it in years, I guess since pricing for SQL Server 2008 was announced. I've not been in a situation where I could justify the costs as the project (hopefully) was successful and scaled up. I also don't like being forced to run my database server on Windows. For these reasons, I just don't use it any more except in projects where it was selected years ago. I know you have to look at TCO, but I still can't generally justify the costs for SQL Server and Windows Server.
If I was working in a corporate environment with big budgets to throw at projects, then I'd probably still be using it SQL Server at times. In my world though, it generally just doesn't add up.
Google long maintained that the engineer was solely responsible for this aspect of the project, which resulted in official investigations, some still unresolved, in more than a dozen countries. But a complete version of the F.C.C.’s report, released by Google on Saturday, has cast doubt on that explanation, saying that the engineer informed at least one superior and that seven engineers who worked on the code were all in a position to know what was going on.
The F.C.C. report also had Engineer Doe spelling out his intentions quite clearly in his initial proposal. Managers of the Street View project said they never read it.
Depicting his actions as the work of a rogue “requires putting a lot of dots together,” Mr. Milner said enigmatically Sunday before insisting again he had no comment. He said he was closely following the news reports on the issue.
If that's all to be believed, Milner reported on what he was doing, and sent it to his boss(es). They opted to "not read" the report. If at least six other engineers were in a position to know, then this sounds more like a "no, don't put this in writing or tell us what you're doing" situation than a rogue employee. If bosses aren't responsible for their employees, what are they there for?
Replace "children" with "mountain bike".
Monday: Help the mountain bike with the homework.
Tuesday: Help the mountain bike wash the cat/dog.
Friday: Take the mountain bike out bowling.
Wait, that didn't work out as well as I thought it would. Still, you get the picture.
A grey market, according to Wikipedia, "is the trade of a commodity through distribution channels which, while legal, are unofficial, unauthorized, or unintended by the original manufacturer."
That coincides with the definition I'd understood of a grey market. I checked Wikipedia before responding to make sure I wasn't wrong. For example, I have a grey market vehicle. It was never sold in this country, but was legally imported outside the regular channels. If I'd forged the VINs or done something illegal in order to bring in a vehicle that is not legally allowed here, that would have been a black market import.
You can only use Google Flight Search for flights originating in the United States. Therefore, it's a non-starter for me in Canada when compared to, say, Kayak.
Maybe I'm not understanding your issue, but Kayak does something like this. You can do a search from multiple airports, to multiple airports. You can include surrounding airports. You can have it email you daily search results for the cheapest flight per month for the next few months. That way, say you want to fly to Amsterdam or Paris or Geneva, and you don't care when you fly between today and October, and you're willing to stay for anywhere from 7-14 nights, you can get daily notifications of fare changes for all that and book when you see a price you like.
I'd like Dropbox a lot more if they offered personal plans above 100GB. I have more like 400GB I'd like to sync between multiple computers, and store off-site. Therefore, Dropbox doesn't work for me. Google Drive will scale to 16TB.
Thanks for the clarification. I don't remember all the details now. I know I could get it to boot with no video, because I'd be able to get into it via SSH and Back-to-my-Mac. However, I don't remember if that was with the internal drive or an external one. I remember them saying they couldn't get the chime to work, so they said it "didn't boot" according to their criteria. They also used an external diagnostics drive for part of this.
Anyway, the result was that although it was a faulty GPU that caused the problem, they classed it as a motherboard failure and not a GPU failure, and they wouldn't cover the repair. I've since cannibalized some of the RAM for my wife's Powerbook, and the hdd for something else, and it's sitting here all opened up, like an abandoned whale carcass (although of course much smaller and not as smelly).